Charles Bukowski
Musica per organi caldi

Reading Bukowski at my age should be forbidden; in fact, it should be prohibited for "those under thirty". Why? Because within it, you find despair, cynicism, perversion, death, and many damned and tormented souls, faded photocopies of the reality surrounding us in this third millennium, which smells more like an open sewer, but "globalized".

Does it no longer strike my heart? Maybe.

Does it no longer make me uncomfortable? Maybe.

Does it no longer "disgust" me? Maybe.

Yet, in less than twenty-four hours, I read these stories, published in the USA in 1983 under the original title "Hot Water Music" (please, let's not use the translated title: "Musica per organi caldi"): they narrate a world 30 years ago, damnably current, desperately nightmarish, as far from the American Dream as violence is from Gandhi's mind.

These 36 stories gather tales of pure fantasy, sometimes "mephistophelean", in a whirlwind of a crowd in perpetual motion, yet still immobile and entrenched in the positions conquered. Our drunkard does not forgo surely autobiographical episodes, which he brings to us through one of his alter egos, Hank Chinaski.

In the story "How to Get Published", he makes his artist pronounce the famous phrase: <<Genius is in the ability to express deep concepts in a simple way>>. In a few words, he explains his entire "way" of writing, of proposing himself, and all his desire to be understood: strange and unusual for people like him!

However, damn it, Bukowski will always be an old satyr drunkard, a damn bastard writer, but behind that often repellent and irreverent mask, peeking through, like in backstage scenes you shouldn't see, is a sensitive and tormented soul.

What else to add? I don't know, maybe I should have finished a while ago or not started at all...

Okay, a few more lines: the souls about whom he narrates are treated almost with love, sweetness, and infinite resignation, but never with superiority or arrogance. After all, it is always he who writes: << All writers are assholes. That's why they feel the need to write>>.

Sorry, Mr. Bukowski, and the non-writers? Great Charles, give me five...